


The Thing with feathers, that perches in My soul

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Supernatural, X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Big Bang Challenge, Child Abandonment, Child Abuse, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2014, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, M/M, Mutant Dean, Non-Graphic Violence, Past Child Abuse, Prostitution, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 02:04:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2604545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester is born different. In a world swirling with emotions, he is born unable to perceive a single one. Cas changes that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thing with feathers, that perches in My soul

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing.  
> This was beta-read by the lovely pinkcarnation, thanks for everything!  
> Minor warning-this fic isn't the most Sam friendly. I am in no way attempting to character bash anyone, but I think Sam's desire to be normal, stemming from his and Dean's rather horrible childhood, might have won out over accepting mutants. Feel free to disagree, I actually quite like Sam, this is just how he ended up behaving in this particular scenario in my head.  
> The art is by the amazing torikins0 on Tumblr. Link for art is at the top of the fic.

_[Art fill by Torikins0](http://deancas91190dc.livejournal.com/649.html) _

Dean Winchester doesn’t believe in miracles. 

He must have once, he supposes, when he was a little boy with too long hair, following his mother around with a preternaturally quiet step, and an “unnaturally” strong ability to love with all his heart. 

John always thought Dean inherited that heart from Mary. Later, in his slightly more sober moments, he allows himself to wonder if it was the other way around all along.

But, after the intrusion of fires so like hell that lapped at the edges of his life since his fourth year on planet earth, colours and words and thoughts and pictures and feelings he can’t feel and overloaded senses colliding into a endless string of LOUD, threatening to consume any crack of weakness, to burst in and consume all, he doesn’t believe in miracles.

Good things don’t happen. Not in his experience. It’s a belief that is reinforced with every hunt, every broken heart, every bleeding soul that all the salting in the world won’t cauterize. 

Dean is quite possibly the most cynical twenty year old you’ll ever meet. According to himself anyway. And John, but who’s counting. 

The fire gets in when Dean is twenty-six, after twenty-two years of fighting a battle he knew was lost before he even started. He tried anyway. 

Dean has never believed in praying either, but he does it then, for his little brother, for the hope of a family he’s lost, twice over.

He thinks nobody was listening. He’s so sure. He should have known better. Either way.

Somewhere, somewhen, somehow, in the fires of hell itself, though not hell on earth-yet-his prayers are answered, by a thing with feathers, that perches-ie, roosts permanently- in his heart, glues his soul back together, and proves that good things do happen after all. 

Dean Winchester still doesn’t believe in miracles. He only prays to one being, and it certainly isn’t God. 

He prays to Cas, because he will always believe in him. Always. 

Somehow, that’s so much more awesome than a miracle could ever be.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Dean doesn’t remember manifesting. Later, Cas will tell him about how much Mary Winchester loved her little boy, how blessed she felt-knew- she was. Then, he just knows that it wasn’t really a case of manifesting.

Before the age of eleven, he didn’t know what mutation was-he didn’t know he was cursed. That’s what he tells people, anyway. Cas, and surprisingly-or not so much-Erik both look at him with understanding but ironic eyes so often that he eventually just stops talking at all, but that’s then, this is now.

Regardless, he’s eleven when his father comes “home” to a crime scene and finds his younger son desperately clinging to his older brother on the roof of a squad car. Behind them, four crying-human-thugs are being led into a secure van by a SWAT team.

There isn’t a mark on any of them, but somewhere, John swears he can smell burning flesh.

It isn’t much, but somehow it’s enough that John stops living in mental Egypt and pieces together the strange occurrences surrounding his amazing boy. He uses a very different word than gift.  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John doesn’t hunt Dean, which Erik and Charles both later reflect is insanely lucky-well, Erik calls it luck, Charles thinks the man simply didn’t have the guts, which, for all his idealistic extremes, isn’t sympathy-John Winchester is one of the only people who ever incites true rage in Charles by his mere mention-it’s a short list, including Shaw, Kurt Marko, and William Stryker-John should be flattered, Erik thinks.  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
The Westchester school-and with it the people that will one day redefine, or perhaps simply define at all, his definition of family-don’t enter Dean’s life until just after his thirteenth birthday. By this point, he’s a whole lot older and a whole lot more broken then he was two years previously, and it has nothing to do with monster hunting.

John is investigating a lead on a werewolf, and leaves his sons alone for a little longer than normal.

Dean is busted hustling in the Red Light corner of the no-name stop over where John ditched them, trying to get enough money to feed Sam at least one square meal a day.

The cops call the FBI when Dean’s last name connects to John on the most wanted list. Agent Duncan calls Xavier’s when he finds Dean attempting- and succeeding- to walk out of their secure facility, and doing a damn freakily fine job of it.

Charles has a lot of strings he can pull, but even he can’t swing custody of a nine-year old, human boy, just so he can stay with his delinquent, mutant-freak- brother. So, Sam goes to a nice foster family on Rhode Island-he’ll later break Dean’s heart by spending the next three years going on about the picture perfect life Dad yanked him out of- because the Peterson’s were so great and they were planning to adopt him-like Dean hadn’t just lost everything as well.

Dean arrives at the School beyond skittish, fighting tooth and nail. They all try, but by day three he’s made Logan cry, and Erik finally decides to see what all the fuss is about.

It takes three bite wounds, a pile of tears and yelling, and a garage full of mangled lumps of what were formerly known as cars, but Dean finally stops acting like he’s been captured by a nest of vampires and starts acting like what he is. A terrified, messed up, scared witless kid.   
Somehow, it’s Erik that eventually gets through a chink in his armour. It’s only dinner, and only spaghetti at that, but Charles smiles so wide Logan swears he hears something crack.  
Erik never quite figures out why he was the one, why this kid, Charles is usually the one who handles things like that, or in a pinch Hank or even Logan. Erik handles the issue the way he handles most things, by making it a non-issue. But privately, just between him and probably Charles at some point if he’s being perfectly honest, he’ll always put it down to the way, when Dean looks at him with those big green, so world-weary but so damn hopeful, eyes, he looks exactly like Charles.  
Later, Erik will remember this as the moment Dean became his, the first moment he reminded Erik of Charles, by trusting Erik when all logic, reason, and instinct told him not to. Or rather, this is the moment Erik starts thinking of Dean as theirs.

==========================================================  
Dean is the closest they ever come to legally adopting a student as their own child. They would have, had the paper work ready to file and everything, if John Winchester hadn’t waltzed back into their lives. 

Erik doesn’t know when Charles started loving Dean-Charles loves everybody-but he knows Charles sees a lot of Erik in Dean. He knows, that for Charles, Dean will always be theirs as well-a perfect amalgamation of them. Erik never admits to Charles that he too has thought of Dean as theirs since the moment he laid eyes on the scared, oh-so-familiarly haunted boy. 

Losing him hurts unlike anything Erik’s ever felt, Shaw not withstanding.

It’s so simple, so stupid-John Winchester decides after 19 months that the heat has died down enough for him to waltz back in and collect his sons.

He shows up at the Mansion one beautiful spring day, and Charles is there to greet him, an army of paper work, lawyers, powers, and love, marshaled and ready to do battle.

Only, John fought dirty. He brought Sammy.

Dean’s done many things for his little brother, but walking away from the two people who’d de facto become his parents is probably the hardest to bear.

(He knows Sammy lost a lot too, when John came back. He knows the Peterson’s fought to keep Sam-that they were killed by Yellow Eyes before the next summer-in his darkest forty years, Dean will sometimes wonder just how far John would go, to keep his youngest son “safe”.)

It’s because of all that that he asks his parents for the hardest thing he could ever ask of them. He asks them to let him go.

His heart breaks more than a little when they do it. 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Dean writes faithfully, every day, for three years. He hides it from John-never Dad, not anymore-, somehow, and uses up what little money is left from his jobs to pay for food for Sammy to squirrel away stamps and envelopes. He steals paper and pencils from local libraries and school desks.

He’s careful. John never suspects. But Sammy does. Dean isn’t trying to hide from him. It never occurred to him he should.

When Dean is sixteen, two years in, he stops getting any replies. He waits, one month, two, three. He risks it and calls-the line connects just as John comes home, so early-why-and then he never has the chance to try again.

John finds the letters. He burns them.

Dean tries to write again, but his fingers take a year to heal, and by then, his father’s beaten the memory of home into a far distant corner of his mind(years later, this is when Dean will start to realize that yes, maybe genetics are right after all and mutations are inherited from the paternal line). Then, he just buries his heart deep, and remembers the mission: protect Sammy.

Except Sammy doesn’t need protecting anymore. He’s off at Stanford, human and proud.

Dean’s not quite sure why he stays with John after that-maybe he’s clinging to the only family he thinks will accept the broken thing he’s become. Maybe he’s just scared home never existed at all.

Dean’s never entirely sure when he started to lose his little brother-when Sammy slipped away forever and became Sam.

He knows when he started to notice Sammy slipping away, the taste of rotting plums suffusing a light summer breeze, the ghost of a little girl burning up in front of them, Sammy already past Dean’s eyeline at thirteen, scowl firmly etched into his unlined face, growling away the arm Dean tries to comfort him with, snapping “Sammy” is a girl’s name, so maybe Dean should stop being such a F*G. 

Intellectually, Dean knows Sam was just a kid, a messed up and abused one, and that this rejection was perfectly natural from a psychological point of view. For Dean though, a part of him will always be stuck in a haunted orchard full of rotting plum trees on a June day in his seventeenth year, feeling the disgust rolling off his little brother so loud it makes his teeth ache with acrid sweetness, sensing a rejection he’d previously only associated with his father, slashing across the bond he shares with his baby brother. 

It will take nearly twenty years for Dean to lose his brother completely, filled with some good times, some times when he can suppress the memory of that ever present acridity hovering around Sam whenever Dean is present. He never forgets though. 

He can never stomach plums again after that.   
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   
When Dean is thirty-one, two years after the Apocalypse ground to a shuddering halt, when he’s still waiting-on a wing and a prayer, well, two wings and a lot of prayers-for Cas to show up, Sam shows up instead.

Charles lets him in, with the interesting random thought that maybe Dean shouldn’t tell Erik about his visit.

Dean hasn’t seen Sam in nearly two years, since his little brother walked away from the freaky world that is Dean’s genetic existence, and choose safe, ordinary suburbia. Dean can never quite be angry about that-he lost Sam a long time ago.

They greet each other a tad warily, not all that friendly but not cold either. Dean loves his brother, always will, but he’s still trying to explain to a doe-eyed two turned four year old where Mummy went, and why Daddy doesn’t like him anymore, and there are some things Dean’s tired of making excuses for. He’s just done covering for his blood.

He doesn’t ask if Sam wants to see his son. Sam doesn’t bring it up. 

Sam makes small talk for a few minutes about his shiny new law degree, his lovely job, his lovely girlfriend who comes complete with two little girls who are all blond haired-blue-eyed ordinary humanity.

He stands up, awkward and gangly as ever, hesitating, before reaching into his carry bag-Dean had wondered-and withdrawing an honest to god sack, roughly the size of a small bear.

He places it carefully on the desk beside Dean, and leaves quietly. Dean barely acknowledges his exit-he’ll later wonder if he imagined the ghosted I’m sorry that wafted through the air as the door swung shut.

Erik comes in an hour later to find Dean in tears, most of the room destroyed-Dean never loses control of his power, which is all psychic anyway, so he literally has to throw things the old fashioned way to have a temper tantrum.

Spilling across the desk, onto the floor is every letter Charles and Erik ever wrote to their almost son-literally hundreds of them, the ones they never stopped sending, even when it had been ten years and they had no real address to send them too.

Dean had known they looked, but Jesus-

It never occurred to Dean to hide his writing from Sammy as well as John-but, Sam was twelve and missing his own chance at happiness, at home, and Dean had been all he’d had. 

For all that it pains him deep in places he didn’t know could ache, Dean never blames Sam for this-not even for keeping it to himself for so long. Other things, yes, but this, Dean will give his little brother this. At least he knows it was done out of love. 

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Dean knows exactly when he stopped trying to keep Sam, stopped trying to get Sammy back. When he let go.

It was the day everything was supposed to stop, when Erik and Charles were both supposedly dead according to that oh so reliable resource-the news, which was the only line of information Dean had left about his former home, thanks to his father. Of all the things John did over the years, Dean always thinks that one might actually bother him the most. 

Dean’s standing on one side of a crappy motel bed, the room full of bad incense and mold-Dean has slightly more bruises than Sam, a feat when Sam looks like a walking water colour of blues and blacks. Most of his ribs are shot, and one arm is held functional by little more than a rather literal wing and a prayer. 

Dean hasn’t asked his little brother for anything since Sam was ten, and Dean was begging him to just follow him home. Sam’s response then was quite similar to his response now. Dean wishes with all he is that he was surprised. 

Still, he tries. He ignores the words swirling like a HUD across his vision, disjointed as the smash of colours-red and black and blue and grey because the world actually is that cliché- the smell of rotting fruit mixing together to create the equivalent of a psychic “Fuck You” writ large between them. 

Dean ignores all that. It’s one of the most painful things he’s ever done, and that’s saying a lot, but he tries. He stands before a man who has grown from a boy he loved like his own child, to a man who he doesn’t know anymore, not really. 

This one time, Dean asks his brother for one thing. He asks him to help Dean save Cas. Not the world, not mutant or human kind, not even the future. Just Cas. 

Dean will always hate himself just a little bit more for the fact he doesn’t ask-for the millionth time, but still-where Ruby went, where she took their son. He tells himself it’s because Sam doesn’t know, as he’s sworn on so many occasions, but he knows deep down that it’s because he doesn’t think he could stand even one more betrayal right in that moment.

Sam says no. Then he walks away. He has reasons, of course, and probably rather good ones. Dean probably wouldn’t listen to them if he were capable of it. 

This if not a one-sided conflict. Even Dean can see that. There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong. Dean’s asking Sam to risk everything he is, including the family he’s trying to build, for a blind hope of saving the most important thing in the world to Dean. Which apparently isn’t Sam anymore. 

Dean does something when Sam walks away, something that will always haunt him, something he will never truly forgive himself for. He acts like John Winchester. It’s just for a moment, but the snarled “If you walk out that door, don’t you ever come back” can’t be taken back. 

It doesn’t take empathy to know that those words hurt Sam more deeply than almost anything else ever has. 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Dean has always been able to taste emotions. Feeling them escapes him for much of his life-even after Cas, taste is still largely just how he reads the world around him. Anger tastes like bullets, burning hot metal on bone. Amusement tastes like cotton candy, sickly sweetness that burns bright and hard on one’s tongue. Pain tastes like blood boiling. Joy tastes like sunlight and sea spray. Dean’s never been able to identify every emotion just like that though. Some he has to learn. Love is one of those.

Like most things in his life, it starts off so casually, so small. He’s in Bobby’s kitchen of all places, attempting to show Cas how to slice onions without them both slicing their fingers off. It’s completely laughable on more than one level, because Dean sucks at chopping anything, and Cas the Angel who can’t cry is currently drenching them both in salty secretions.

Sam is sitting at the table, trying not very successfully to keep a straight face and pretend to be engaged in research and not his favourite new sport of watching Dean watch Cas watch Dean. Bobby’s in the front room cursing rather loudly about “idjits and fluffy gay bromances” and Dean is so taking away both their Internet connections.

Why is Dean teaching Cas cooking skills one might ask? One might ask in a sane universe, but Dean long ago gave up on believing that there was any such thing, and he has no idea why they’re chopping onions anyway.

Dean was letting Cas read John’s journal for purely research purposes and the feathered idiot somehow managed to dig up Deanna Campbell’s recipe for French onion soup that Dean didn’t even know his father ever had in the first place. He thinks he might just remember its taste, and Cas-who is quite frankly better at reading Dean’s emotions than Dean, the fricking empathy in this relationship, is at reading his supposedly non existent ones-catches a fleeting flair of happiness from Dean, and runs for the hills, or in this case, the kitchen.

Long story short, now they’re standing at Bobby’s ridiculously uneven counter with the sulphur and grease and no one wants to know what that is stains, with his secret stash of ridiculously big ass white onions, attempting not to dismember each other, or Sam or Bobby-Dean may be losing that particular battle.

Another onion slips out of Cas’ inept grip, the knife sliding dangerously towards their overlaid fingers, and Cas huffs the first laugh Dean’s ever heard from him, causing Dean to practically smash their faces together in surprise. Sam makes choking noises from the corner, and Dean is suddenly momentarily possessed by a benevolent demon-that’s his explanation and he’s sticking to it-and gives in to the insane temptation to stick out his tongue and lick Cas’ tears away. It’s only the briefest brush of tongue, not even a proper caress, but Cas drops the knife entirely, and Sam dissolves under the table in guffaws.

Dean stares at Cas with something akin to horror, ignoring the honking noises in the background. He and Cas stare at each other, frozen, for about half a nano-second, before Cas takes the initiative like always, and slowly and deliberately reaches out to grasp the side of Dean’s face, and carefully runs his tongue across Dean’s right cheek. It’s slow and drawn out and hot as hell, a moment of pure sexual tension, until Bobby chooses that particular moment to roll into the room. He takes one look at the two of them, glances at the gasping Sam on the floor, and promptly executes a rather graceful about face, muttering “idjits” in a rather loud tone.

Dean and Cas stare at each other for a further five seconds, before promptly dissolving into fits of laughter of their own. Sam stares at them like they’re crazy.

That’s the moment that Dean discovers this-contentment, joy?-well, Cas always calls it bliss, tastes like tears and onions-salty and sweet and throat clogging to the point of breathlessness.

It’s later the same afternoon, when they’re-just him and Cas, as Sam had beat a hasty retreat when the smoke started rising, and Bobby never emerged from his book museum after the licking incident-eating the surprisingly edible soup, somehow maintaining eye contact while spooning soup into their mouths at the same time, licking soup off each other’s mouths between laughs and kisses like they’re the teenagers they never really got to be, emotions and flavours so heady Dean thinks he might just be high on onions, that he realizes that love tastes like onion soup, caramelized and smooth and warm and comforting, like edible safety rolled up in a secure bowl with a side of crisp bread.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Falling for Cas was never that simple entirely. It took months and years for trust to be cemented, days and hours for lives to be changed. Their journey was warped and backwards and forwards, all the wrong speeds and times and days and events. The big milestones little hills and the little moments giant mountain ranges. 

Cas proposes to Dean over breakfast one morning by passing him a box of cereal with the label rearranged to pose the age old question, Dean responds without breaking contact with his morning toast by flicking the crusts on his plate into an artful affirmative. 

Dean agonizes for six months-really-over choosing the colour scheme for their bedroom. Considering Cas isn’t actually on the planet for any of this, it’s not quite so weird, but still a bit disproportionate even for them. Logan solves the problem, like he usually does with most things around the Mansion, by stomping into the room carrying what looks like half a hardware store, colour coordinated equally between shades that match Dean’s eyes, and shades that match those in the picture of Cas that Dean is always caressing when he thinks no one is looking. 

They decide to keep Nix by stumbling over each other’s sentences, Cas getting out the words “We’re keeping him” out half a millisecond before Dean completes the third word of the same phrase. 

They decide to have more kids the same way, over and over, meeting each other’s eyes over the head of some new stray that wanders into the Mansion’s influence, words largely abandoned in all but the most mundane sense for them long before. 

Dean marries Cas three days after the first-and only-proposal. One serial marriage to the same people ad infinitum couple in the family is enough for all of them. Dean sends Sam an invitation. He tries not to be too crushed when he never hears back, not even a return to sender or something equally pithy. 

Cas plans the wedding with Erik of all people, so Dean safely disavows any knowledge of how they end up standing under the maple walk in the third lower terrace, Erik giving Cas away, Charles giving Dean away, clouds of pink blossoms and pale blue crepe paper covering every surface, Logan somehow serving as their collective best man team, decked out in matching pink and blue. Seriously, what the heck-Dean’s half way through a mental rant everyone can, for once, hear, when ACDC suddenly blasts across the garden, Erik stepping forward to perform a probably totally non-official ceremony that is sacrilegious on so many levels, no matter what religion one follows, that it’s probably a major abomination to even attend. 

All that considered, there’s a surprising number of people there. There are so many missing, both through death and abandonment and prejudice, that Dean can almost feel guilty about how happy he is in that moment. Almost. 

Wedding jitters are starting to leak out over the entire gathered blasphemy tempters, old tuna sandwiches clashing painfully with the pungent natural blossomy aroma permeating the spring day, when Cas swoops in to save the day like he always has. 

As Cas’ eyes slide into Dean’s for the millionth time, the blossom aroma sweeps into and over everything, intensifying to an intoxicating level, and somehow Dean swears, for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, he can really feel. 

The roar of laughter, tears, clapping, and smiles that erupts preternaturally simultaneously over their heads leaves no doubt in anyone’s mind what emotion their resident empath is feeling. 

Nobody ever asked Dean how Cas made him feel, not even Bobby or Sam. Nobody ever asked if Cas made him feel happy, or safe, or loved. Maybe they knew Dean couldn’t really answer any of those questions genuinely. Maybe they just didn’t care. Dean never finds out which it is, but in that one moment, so special and so large and yet so trivial, almost an afterthought really, he knows one thing for certain. 

Cas makes him feel. 

Always has and always will. 

He wouldn’t trade that for anything. 

When Dean thinks about happiness after that, he can never say what it tasted or smelt like, sounded or looked like. But he can always say what it felt like. Feels like.  
\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   
Dean lets his little brother walk away one Thursday in November, after Sam’s walked back in the door Dean was too beaten to slam in his wake, three weeks too late for it to really matter, but not quite late enough for it to be too late at all, for the world at least.

He let Sam go after Sam helped save the world, and Dean saved Cas, so the three of them could finish saving the world together. They stand there, swords poised in a perfect trinity, points touching where Lucy’s neck was a moment before. For one brief, miraculous moment, the sun slips from behind a cloud and the air is filled with the smell of frying onions, Bobby’s ugly ass plaid kitchen décor shimmering around their edges, laughter ripping through their chests, a moment of pure communion. For that one moment, Dean thinks he might be truly happy.

Dean will never feel like that again. Different kinds of happiness, contentment and love, yes, but never quite that.  
The moment is broken instants later, never to be gotten back. Dean knows that even then, somehow. And while it means the world to Dean that Sam stayed long enough for the job to get done, While Sam may say he forgives Dean for what was said, something between them is forever broken after that-or perhaps they are simply finally acknowledging that something has been broken for an awfully long time.   
Dean knows Sam might have stayed if he’d asked, might just have in that moment. But Dean also knows that some things shouldn’t be fixed. The dead should stay dead. Sometimes you just gotta let go.

So Dean lets Sammy go that day. He loses Cas seconds later, a wave of angelic light beaming him away like the freaking starship Enterprise, and where there were onions moments before, all he can smell is salt and fire, destruction and devastation up to his knees.

A stiff breeze blows in from the West, and for a moment, Dean could swear he smelt plums.

 

Three weeks later, Dean packs up the few possessions he has in the world, paying particular care to a worn journal wrapped in a singed old plaid tea towel, a baby rattle made from bullet casings, and a tattered trench coat, punches out of Bobby’s silent house, carefully limps into the Impala, and heads North.  
\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Hank will one day suggest that Sam thinks he lost Dean even longer ago, when Dean betrayed their silent brotherhood agreement to always be different together. When Dean became a little too different. When their father started hating Dean and taking it out on Sam. When Dean looked like Mary, while Sam was just looking like John. When Dean got parents, and got to keep them. 

While Dean may attempt to punch Hank for the comment-one never gets very far when ones opponent is blue and furry and faster than a cheetah and Dean knew that swinging in, secretly he knows Sam believes he lost Dean the day Cas saved him, when Sam could not. The day Cas became the most important person in Dean’s life. He knows because Sam screams this at him loud enough for it to filter into his mind as words rather than sounds or tastes or colours-odd, distorted images tinged with smoky burning wood. 

Dean sometimes finds it hard to remember they were a family once, him and Sam and Cas and Bobby. Only one of them actually died, but Dean lost them all in so many ways so close together, that it’s hard to imagine they ever just were. 

One of the greatest gifts Cas will ever give him is the rather vivid memory of a soup and sun tinged afternoon in a crappy kitchen, when they were all young and happy and alive. When they all simply were.

Cas gives him the gift of knowing that that, for however short a time, that was real.   
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dean only sees Sam once after that the day with the letters, shortly after Cas finally comes back for good. One of those perfect, blue eyed little model humans manifests on her tenth birthday, perfectly innocently at the breakfast table one Sunday morning, dousing a burning waffle with water from the sink, while standing over twenty feet away from both locations.

It’s an idyllic way to manifest, with no traumatic event or trigger point, just instinct over domestic mishaps interrupting domestic bliss. Unfortunately, human nature never catches up as quickly as biology, and it often much crueler than fate.

Dean doesn’t actually say anything to Sam when he shows up to deposit (the only word for the way he drops the girl off, one backpack and a pair of purple flame sneakers to her name) Joannie on Dean’s front door(he has lived at Xavier’s for less than a quarter of his life, but it will always be the only home he’s ever truly known, and he’ll always think of part of it as his-theirs).

He stands on the step, stone faced and arms crossed, mask perfectly in place. He can see the emotions leaking off Sam, colours and notes and words swirling together like a cloud bank. Joannie is keening, but Sam…Sam is screaming. Screaming about the unfairness of it all, the words why, why, why, not again, why, oh god not again crashing together around him, intense enough to hurt Dean on a far deeper level than he anticipated.

It has hurt to be around Sam since Dean was thrown back into his vagabond existence, nearly 19 years previously, but Dean’s never let it affect him as much as it does in this moment.

So, it is Cas who strides to meet the car (a lame beige Civic, the epitome of the boring normality Sam is so desperate to hold on to), assuming the role of Dean’s co-temporary head of the institute, as Erik and Charles are on another honeymoon(this makes five that year, but only Logan pretends to be counting).

It is Cas who quietly greets Joannie, lifting her meager “luggage”, nodding gruffly to Sam, gesturing towards the door where Dean stands watch. Nobody is surprised when Sam executes an abrupt about face, slamming the Civic into gear seconds later, sparing Joannie one agonized glance, before tearing out of the drive, headed back to a lonely paddle down some river in Egypt.

It is that last glance that breaks Dean, that finally succeeds in shattering whatever hope he held out for one day getting his little brother back. If Sam had driven away without a backward glance, Dean could have gone on pretending not to care, pretending to not love Sam, not to be desperately hopeful that one day his brother will show up, wanting to be part of their lives. Denying that he would welcome him with eager, unquestioning arms.

Cas has never given Dean any indication of how he feels about Sam, or Dean’s relationship with his brother. For all Dean knows, Cas thinks the relationship Sam and Dean don’t have is normal for siblings.

In that one instant though, when Cas’ eyes slide up to click with Dean’s over Joannie’s head and twenty yards of gravel drive, when Cas lets Dean read him, when Dean hears the last anguished rasp of his baby brother’s voice, echoing across time. “I’m sorry.”, he knows that Cas understands. That he’s always understood.

Understood that Dean loves his brother, more than almost anything. That he always will.

Understood that Sam may not always be entirely worthy of that undying devotion, but Dean will never allow anyone to voice such a truth. Not even Cas.

Understands that John Winchester broke his kids in different ways, and some parts of Sam can never be healed.

Understands that no matter how hard Dean tried, he wasn’t Charles Xavier. He was just a kid.

Understands that Dean understands that Sam is doing the only thing he can think of to do right by Mary Joanna Beth Winchester, by leaving her with the only family that never left Sam. By leaving her with people he knows will love her. By giving her a chance to know his brother, by giving her a chance to know her’s too.

Joannie deserves the chance to have what Sam never had, what he can’t give her. What Dean tried so fucking hard to give him, but couldn’t. What Charles and Erik gave Dean. What Dean can give Joannie. A family, a home, a place to belong.

Dean hates Sam more than a little for not even staying to try, even if he does understand why.

Above all, standing there on that late Sunday afternoon, the scent of plums burning so loudly through the air that the entire school can smell them, rain slicking down to join Dean’s tears and douse everything, suddenly spiking upwards again before falling anew around and between them, Cas understands that for Sam and Dean, that one last glance meant one eternal thing…goodbye.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dean meets Cas in a barn. It has nothing to do with the nativity.

Dean is twenty seven, and hasn’t used his abilities actively for eleven years, in reality, or fifty nine in limbo-regardless of what John always insisted, the “passive” parts of Dean’s gift doesn’t have an “off” switch-Dean only wishes they did.

He takes him approx. 3 and a half minutes to fall for Cas, and a lifetime to admit the former. Dean will spend the better part of the next five years insisting he detested Cas on sight.

In truth, Cas unsettled him in a way no one ever had, frightened him beyond words or reason.

The reason for this fear was very simple. Cas saw Dean.

Also, for the first time since he was twelve, Dean has just met someone he can’t read. The only other cases are the obvious suspects-Charles and Erik-and the perhaps less obvious, or maybe more obvious, depending on one’s level of oblivion-Logan and John.

Dean doesn’t have precognition, or even intuition really, but somehow, in that barn in the middle of god definitely doesn’t know where, he knows one thing with certainty. It was always Cas.  
\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Cas wasn’t a mutant. When all the mojo was stripped away he was essentially, terrifyingly human. Dean never really manages to give this more than a passing thought, neither in the long months of the almost apocalypse slide year when Cas lost his angelness by inches and miles, nor in the blessedly peaceful but sorely interrupted years of peace that represents the only fraction they’ll ever see of their more than well deserved happy reward ending.

Partly, this is due to the complete lack of prejudice or bias Dean seems to have been born with-Erik always found this one of Dean’s most remarkable qualities, a feeling which Charles never quite shared, even after meeting John Winchester, probably more than partly due to John’s startlingly disturbing resemblance to certain specters from his own childhood.

Mostly, it’s due to the fact it is an immaterial moot point from the word go, because Cas might fall human, but Jimmy was never anything but a mutant in the first place. Looks like mutation is physical or genetic, not spiritual, as Jimmy’s soul fled to heaven a long time ago Cas informs Dean solemnly one morning, high as a kite-Dean lets Cas try pot once, and only once, the memory of it being more than strong enough to sustain any further cravings for the next century or so.

Regardless of how it happened, fate, DNA or an act of freaking god, Jimmy’s startlingly powerful telekinesis passes smoothly to Cas, enabling the angel turned man turned mutant to manipulate objects, people, and surroundings so skillfully it often looks like he can still manipulate time itself. Which is great, saves their lives on countless occasions, and avoids even more awkward conversations with Erik over tea and crumpets mere minutes after Cas finally appears in the flesh on Charles and Erik and Dean’s lawn, knee deep in the ornamental pond.

Except, Mutation is linked to DNA, which is linked inexorably to genetics, making Claire as much a mutant as her father.

Stupidly, Dean’s later words, Dean doesn’t realize this when he first met the girl, even after witnessing Jimmy’s talent first hand. Amelia seems to know about her husband, and the fact she could accept that-even if angelic possession was a little beyond even her-makes Dean far more assured about leaving Claire with her mother after he finally realizes the significance, two years into Cas’ disappearance.

Claire shows up at the school three days before Cas does, leaving little doubt as too the nature of her mutation. Significantly and sadly nearly uniquely among the “parents” of their students, Claire’s mother didn’t give her up. Amelia neither signed over parental rights upon dropping her daughter off, nor sped away in a squeal of tires. There were actual hugs, complete with requisite tears, promises of visits that might actually be kept, and issues of instructions to temporary caregivers.

None of it’s temporary, the visits never happen, the hugs are really goodbye, and the tears will burn forever, but for once, this can be blamed entirely on fate-in the cruel guise of breast cancer-rather than human indifference.

Amelia dies three months after dropping her daughter off at the school. She never told Claire about her illness, even though she knew then she was dying. (Dean can forgive this, eventually, one day, because he knows Claire, and so he knows that she knew that day that the goodbye was forever). Amelia leaves a will, in which she leaves everything to Claire. Claire herself is left to the guardian Amelia didn’t choose at first, but never failed to appreciate or remember, despite the plethora of relatives willing-if not exactly cuing-to take the girl.

The official documents say Cas Isaiah Winchester, a forged marriage license granting Dean enough proxy authority to survive those three days.

Claire doesn’t quite become their daughter. They already have one of those, and she already had parents. But somehow, they become her guardians, in every sense. They weren’t the ones she chose at first, they weren’t the ones her mother chose at first, but they were the ones that chose her.

And that, more than anything else, is the reason Amelia let Claire have that, when she knew she was about to abandon her only child in death. In her last motherly act, in a lifetime of refreshingly motherly acts, she ensured her daughter’s future, by giving her Cas,… and Dean. In perhaps the most selfless and unselfish act in the universe, she let Cas have Claire.

In a last act that will always speak of undying, unconditional love, she let Claire have Cas too.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Dean isn’t an empath. Not technically. Charles explains it to him once, or attempts to, in that grace period of Dean’s thirteenth year, when everything was safety and love and hot chocolate. Dean doesn’t feel emotions-others or his own-, not exactly. He sees them, hears them, smells them, thinks them, tastes them more often than not, colours and flavours and images and floating numerals blending to form a data stream rivaling most computers. He can project things back at people, not emotions neither, more sensations or associations or memories, somehow.

Erik only tries to explain Dean’s power once. He opens an encyclopedia to an entry marked “synesthesia” and leaves it in Charles’ study where Dean is sure to see it. Charles spends the next five years researching the ways mental irregularities might effect mutations.

Logan simply calls Dean “fusion” one night over kabobs and lasagna, and ends up forever reminding Dean of warm mozzarella melting into seared beef. It’s a lot more comforting than it sounds.

Whatever his power is exactly, Dean only knows two things for certain(well, three really). One, it’s unique and not really definable, two it’s immensely and unexpectedly powerful, and the third sort of thing-it’s the reason he’s got Cas. However else he might feel about his “gift” over the years of his life, that last sort-of fact is the reason he never regrets having it.  
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The funny thing about coming home, is that somehow, no matter how hard you try, it really is like in the movies-hard won, painfully bittersweet, and breathstealingly emotional. 

Dean comes home on June 12, 2010 at approx. 8:06 in the evening. He is thirty one years old, has waited eighteen years for this moment. That doesn’t make it any easier to actually get out of the car. 

Erik solves the problem for him roughly ten seconds after he shuts off the ignition, but somehow it’s Logan who gets to him first.  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Dean only sees John once after the man finally does the decent thing and skiddaddles from Dean’s life at the far too late date of his twenty-second year. Dean can’t honestly say he’s missed his father. He never really knew enough about the man to have anything to miss. John is the only person in Dean’s life he’s never been able to get a read on. There’s a genetic reason for that, he will later discover, but in his heart, he’ll always wonder if this stark lack of his most basic form of connection to other people in the world stems more from a lack of caring than purely DNA.

Nobody is more surprised that Dean when Sam throws back a snappy “You worship dad” in a heated argument when they are sixteen and twenty, and Sam is so, so beyond ready to fly far away from them both. Dean is even more startled to realize Sam is right. He does worship the ground John walks on. Trouble is, no matter how hard he tries, Dean can’t remember when he started doing that.

Dean breaks when John leaves, his senses shattering in a cacophony of sound and smell and feel and taste, overwhelming to the point of near coma, but somehow, Dean’s never felt more free. He doesn’t understand why, then.

Dean’s ten years(or fifty years), two inches, and twenty pounds of muscle harder the next time he sees John. It’s also the last time.

It wasn’t planned. Not on Dean’s part. He has little doubt that John never intended to come back to the School, to the place he took-stole-Dean’s last chance at a childhood from his oldest son. He didn’t quite manage to steal home, and it takes Dean until this last encounter to realize his father’s always tasted like buckets of tart apple regret.

It pours off John that day, shocking Dean into a stand still. His uncertainty, his desire to know, is the only thing that prevents Erik from throwing the man out on the spot. Rather, he forces Logan to exit the hall with a firm hand on his skeleton, gathers Nix closer to his chest to shield the boy from John’s view, and sweeps from the room with a gritted “five minutes” audibly growled at John, a projected “he’s lucky Charles isn’t here or we’d have no body to even have to go to the trouble of hiding” echoing so loudly Dean can actually make out the words themselves, bouncing around the paneled hall. So can John, clearly, and Dean feels his world tilt on its axis. John’s always been good at doing that.

The conversation is brief. Dean asks no questions, and John only monosyllables enough to convey why he’s turned up like a rotten penny-he’s dying and wants to see Dean’s mothers eyes one last time(how novel, but Severus Snape John Winchester most certainly is not Dean thinks bitterly at this pronouncement and his father’s subsequent penetrating stare)-and the fact he’s become no less of an asshole in the intervening near score of years. John drops a photo on the side table, no so much as deigning to brush a hand against Dean’s fingers in this last moment they’ll ever see each other. He doesn’t ask about the mini-John replica(because somehow that’s how Nix’s genetics came out in the wash) Erik carried from the room. At exactly the 2.5 minute mark, John strides purposefully about to the door. He’s nearly through it when Dean gets up the courage to ask a question that has been germinating since he was twenty, or perhaps so much longer.

“Dad, are you a mutant?” It’s nearly shouted, mentally and verbally, and John’s flinch is all the answer Dean needs. Big surprise, it’s also the only one he ever gets. By the time Dean’s drawn breath to gasp, John is gone.

Dean never discovers his father’s mutation, what it was exactly. He decides pretty quickly that it doesn’t really mater. He speculates it was probably something to do with powerful mental suggestion or brainwashing. A large part of him would rather not know. (Charles might know, but the headache the entire state has for three weeks after John’s visit was enough to discourage him from ever asking-really, unexplained hospital visits went up by 70 % and Erik slept on the couch-at the foot of his and Charles’ bed- for two months0.

John is buried in Lawrence, beside Mary. Dean considers it a last favour to a man who never did his best by his sons, but perhaps did all he could with half of his soul missing. Dean knows what that feels like, better than anyone, and while nothing can absolve his father, Dean never can quite bring himself to judge John too harshly. Afterall, he got his own half back.

He visits the grave three months after last seeing John, and there meets the contents of that abandoned photograph. It was slightly faded and blurry, and showed John with a little boy that resembled him in build and jaw line, but had tawny blond hair and bright blue eyes. That little boy is probably a good twenty-four by then, but Dean would recognize his new little brother anywhere.

Adam is as much of a mutant as Sam is, on first glance, until Dean notices the subtle webbing at his brother’s fingers. Not necessarily an X-gene mutation by itself but, as Dean will discover, this particular “abnormality” is accompanied with a distinct affinity for water, which led his littlest brother into the hectic and dangerous life of the coast guard. Adam is reckless and hotheaded and non-biased to an extreme, vegan, freshly orphaned and gay as a maypole. He fits right in.

Dean doesn’t have Claire’s talent, but standing in that cemetery of bitterly sweet memories and haunting ghosts, freshly decayed leaves smelling sweet and earthy around them, he somehow knows that this, this is the start of something good.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Dean will always remember the only surprising thing John said in those final 2.5 minutes, will lay awake thinking about it for years, haunted and conflicted and maybe possibly something like grieving. It was just before he turned to leave, when he was still standing there, gazing at Dean with a critical expression that was tinged with something Dean couldn’t identify then. Confusion perhaps. Or, if he didn’t know so much better, maybe even respect.

The question is somehow more devastating than everything else combined. “When did you become so strong?” It is the honest curiosity in John’s voice that cuts so deep. Even in all these years, how could he never have seen Dean until this moment. It boggles even Dean’s mind. 

There are so many ways to answer this. He could point silently to the picture of Erik and Charles at their sixth engagement party, taken over a year before, Dean smashed between the two of them and the ginormous cake that he suspects Logan actually baked himself. He could draw himself up to his actually half an inch on John height and release the exclamation that’s been trapped in his throat since he was eight-“I’ve always been strong Dad!” 

He could stretch out his power and flash Cas into John’s mind, in all his glory. He could pray for Cas to beam down before them(Dean considers it the most epic feat of self control he’s ever achieved that he resists this last option). 

Dean does none of those things. Instead, he drops his chin to his chest, hunching into himself like a well worn blanket, long discarded into a drawer at the bottom of a closet, closes his eyes to hold in the moisture, and lets the choke in his throat come out rough and wet and strident. “I came home.” It’s a whisper of a shout, a parody of a lifetime worth of agony, and a half hearted gesture at a rebellion, but somehow Dean swears he can feel the apples turn to rot inside John’s soul. 

Dean closes his eyes tighter, memories of a sundrenched fall day, Charles’ sobs and Logan’s shouts and Erik’s iron lock arms encasing him in a wall of crisp fall scented love and comfort and safety. Of crunching leaves and falling colours, kaleidoscoping to form one thought inside his mind, echoed between the four of them in their tentacle embrace, transcending barriers of mind and body and time, coalescing into one word writ large in their shared mental sky…home. 

Letting his father walk away is perhaps the easiest thing Dean has ever done in his life. It’s surprisingly hard to lose something you never had. It’s surprisingly easy to let go of something you’ve never needed after all. 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------

Coming home wasn’t a movie, a fairy tale, an epic adventure, a soliloquy, or a happy ending. It was the start of months and years of loneliness and waiting and love and desperate hope. It was a beginning. And for the first time in Dean’s life, he didn’t regret the endings that brought him to this new start. For the first time in this crazy thing called his life, this actually felt a bit like one day it could be called living.

 

Dean has spent his whole life waiting for things. Waiting for his mother to come back, waiting for his father to wake up one morning and start feeling something besides sweet rotten grief when he looked at his sons, waiting for the chance to run back to a school he sometimes thinks he invented, waiting to go home again, waiting for the day Sam will realize what he’s thrown away(whether that’s Dean or Nix or his gift, Dean never quite knows) and walk back in the door, waiting to be loved.

Mostly, he waits for Cas. Subconsciously, he’d been waiting for Cas for twenty odd years. Carnally, he’d waiting another good five. Emotionally, he’d waited over thirty. Officially, he waits just under four.  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Dean told Cas about the school, about a life he’s just beginning to admit was probably actually real, maybe, between desperate bites of hastily cooked food(Cas refuses most forms of takeout, and all fast food after the incident with Famine), spending nights locked in musty hotel rooms twining their hearts and heads together with stories of acceptance and safety and love and adventure and home.

He lets Cas into his head for the first time three days after meeting him, and if Dean’s honest, Cas never really leaves. By the time Dean loses Cas officially, they’ve been partners in almost every sense of the word for a good two years, living hand to mouth to fist on back roads across the world, jumping with gas or celestial energy or sometimes their own four feet. 

Sam and Ruby were there for parts of it, but really, it was mostly just Dean and Cas, supplemented with occasional stops and Bobby’s. Dean knows that Erik and Charles had their own problems in those years, and for large parts of it they though Dean was dead, but somehow he never quite stops wanting them to turn up and make everything better somehow. 

He and Cas have conversations about everything imaginable, but they’re favourite always starts, When the war is over… Like they’re forbidden lovers in an old WWII flick in black and white that swirls to Technicolor across the spaces inbetween. 

Dean’s response always ends…I’ll take you home. Cas’ always responds-I’ll follow you there. Maybe that should have clued Dean in, but somehow it didn’t. 

The morning after it all ends, after Cas was angelknapped out of existence, Dean finds a piece of paper folded into his car seat. There’s only an address, scrawled in Cas’ Shakespearian like script in faded ink, like he’s been caressing the thing for years on end. 

Dean clutches the paper to his heart, not caring how girly it must look, and allows tears of hope to mingle with the grief dripping down his face.   
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   
It takes Dean all of three days to fit back into the routine of the school, to carve out a place for himself in their hearts and lives that he’s slowly realizing has always been there, waiting for him.

He doesn’t talk about John and Sam, and nobody pushes, although Hank spends most of the next three days repairing sections of the Danger Room that Logan gallantly takes the blame for breaking in the first place.

He starts talking about Cas on the second day in, and doesn’t stop for the next three and a half years.

By the time Cas comes back one rainy April, exactly three years and five months since he vanished, everybody knows him so well that he already has his own mug in the kitchen. Erik’s version of welcoming Cas home(not counting the octopus hug ankle deep in the ornamental pond upon initial contact, apparently) consists of regally stomping into the kitchen and floating the coffee jug towards Cas, who simply gamely holds out his mug while Erik pours boiling hot black liquid past his all too humanly vulnerable hand, to which Erik nods once smartly and spins Cas and his coffee towards Charles’ waiting embrace.

Dean watches with a soft smile and mentally switches his definition of home with the smell of freshly brewed-and freshly burnt, cause nobody is man enough to ever take the coffee maker away from Erik-Jamaican coffee in the dead of the morning.  
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dean may lose Sam and Bobby by increments and suddenly, respectively, to the carnage of the apocalypse, but he also gains a baby. And wasn’t that an unexpected turn up.

In all his imaginings of how he might end up a father, raising a half-demon half-mutant anti-christ with a fallen Angle of the Lord was never even on the radar. 

Ruby names the baby Luke John Winchester. Dean second guesses his decision to take that name and throw it away many times over the years, but he can never quite bring himself to regret it.

Nix enters their lives a year before the war ended, and was ripped quietly out before that year-and war-was up, and even though it takes two years for Dean to get him back, he’s never truly been anyone else’s.

Nix is the bright spot in his world, the little boy he could save, unlike the brother who abandoned them both. Nix has been his-theirs- since he was five days old, and Dean, although he never has to justify the decision to anyone but himself, always maintains that that more than gives him the right to rename his own kid-his own son. 

Despite what people-Sam- will later say, the name he chooses is not a metaphor for second chances, lost childhoods, unlived lives, or broken hopes-it’s real significance is so much better than that.

Really though, he didn’t name the kid at all. He experimented with calling him Luka or Johnny for months, usually just calling him “buddy”, until Cas put his foot down around the kids first birthday, when the first Da and Pa slipped out, and Cas reasoned that if the kid was smart enough to give them names, it was long past time they returned the favour.

Dean flipped Cas off and went back to not-searching organic baby food recipes. Naturally Cas took this to mean that the honour of naming the newest Winchester fell to him-a so-not-fallen angel who Dean had unfortunately just introduced to Harry Potter- which is how he ends up with a kid named after a mythical species of Avian.

Regardless of how it happened, Phoenix Magnus Francis Winchester is officially named the day he is adopted, aged five years, by the only parents he will ever acknowledge. 

They call him Nix, because Phoenix sounds more like a rapper than a toddler, according to Bobby. 

They don’t always get to raise him together-Cas is conspicuously missing from Nix’s next three years of baby turned toddler turned preschooler pictures-, or nearly at all-Ruby runs off with Nix just before the fabled final battle commences, and it takes Charles two million in legal fees to get him back, because somehow demonhood isn’t as good an excuse as abandonment for proving unfitness for parenthood, although it totally should be in Dean’s opinion-but he will always be theirs.

Dean knows this with the same certainty he doesn’t believe in miracles with, a certainty etched into his soul in stone the day Cas finally, finally comes home, breezing in the door as if he’d never been gone, righting a tilted world without even trying, kissing Dean like there is not tomorrow, even though thanks to them, there is now. It’s etched there the moment their little boy’s face lights up with an intensity that rivals all of Vulcan’s fictional suns, and runs towards the missing piece of their little family, the piece that by rights he shouldn’t remember at all, peals of “Daddy” falling from his lips like church bells on a clear morn.

Dean totally doesn’t cry. But he does wonder, for the first time he’s ashamed to admit, trapped between his son and his soulmate, Claire wading quietly towards them, if maybe, just maybe, losing him was just that little bit harder on Charles and Erik than losing them was on him.

Dean does know that he’s never admired his parents more, or felt more loved, because if him and Cas fought the forces of Heaven and Hell themselves to have this moment, to hold the antichrist between them and say theirs and be able to mold a family together out of blasphemy and abomination, Erik and Charles fought the world for the right to just exist at all, let alone to call anything-anyone-theirs. Including each other.

Dean’s never truly realized before, but just as he’s always been theirs, they’ve always been his. They fought for him, and he fought for them.

In that moment, as his parents join the fraught octopi-like embrace, he knows that somehow, despite all odds, they’ve won.

Dean’s saved the world with nothing but a set of wings, a used bullet, and faith he doesn’t have in a God that he knows with certainty would be more helpful if he actually didn’t exist, but somehow, that victory-those victories-seem like nothing compared to the feeling of winning the right to love, and be loved, by whoever he chooses.

\----------------------------------------------------

 

One day, a bit in the future, when everything is sunny and happy again, when the Profs are alive and kicking and kissing like school boys in love for the first time, and all is in its proper realm, Cas takes Dean out on their “first” date.

Dean points out it’s nearly a decade-not to mention Hell, saving the world, a parcel of kids, and lots of smoking hot blasphemous angel/mutant sex-late. Cas laughs his head off.

Naturally, they end up in a crowded corner of the busiest restaurant in the city, -because Rogue’s trying to teach Cas how to be chic and four years human and Cas is still as naïve in some ways as the day he lost himself by gripping the righteous man tight-, and the nosy old lady to their right, who’s husband is currently increasing his fossilization through single minded consumption of what appears to be a whole platter of fried foods, dimples-wrinkles- sweetly at them and asks how they met.

Strangely, they’ve never been asked this question before.

They look at each other. Cas opens his mouth, and then closes it-the last nine years of earthly lessons have finally taught him some tact, and even Dean hasn’t failed to notice the small silver crucifix hanging from the old lady’s wrinkled neck.

Much as Dean dislikes being compared to Erik Lensherr-except when it makes him glow with pride, although he freely admits that Cas is totally his Charles-, there’s only one response to this really. Well, the human-civilian safe response anyway. That doesn’t mean he means it any less.

Dean looks Cas straight in the eyes-he sees flashes of darkness and pain, hopelessness and agony seared with loneliness and despair, he sees light and hope and fire and burning that felt like benediction, he remembers miracles that didn’t happen, prayers that went unanswered, hopes that should never have lived at all, mostly though, he just sees Cas- smiles with devilish abandon, and shamelessly steals Erik’s Sappiest. Line. Ever.

“I though I was alone, and he proved me wrong.”


End file.
